We made it to December, the last month of 2018 and the most wonderful time of the year! Traditionally, the holidays are a slower time where we take time to reflect on the year and spend time with family and friends. But the marketing world stops for nothing. Here’s what’s been going on.

The holidays are fast approaching, as is the end of the calendar year. It’s time to reflect on what worked this year and more importantly, what didn’t. And of course, it’s time to predict what’s going to be the hottest marketing trend of 2019.

According to Buffer, social media personalization is going to be all the rage next year for businesses of all types and sizes. Buffer sites a recent Epsilon study that shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if the company offers a personal experience. Computers can do a lot, but for now, this type of marketing will heavily on actual human interaction.

Zuckerberg has spoken and he’s betting the future of Facebook on video and disappearing stories, not the newsfeed that has made the platform so successful. For now, investors seem to be behind him as stock prices rise higher than they have in six months. But 2019 is going to be a make-it or break-it year for the popular platform.

Currently the main video services, Facebook Watch and Instagram TV are way behind leader YouTube, but Zuckerberg insists this signifies room to grow. There’s also the tiny issue of needing to win back user trust.

Obviously the hot-button marketing topic of the last few weeks is Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign. Since the minute the campaign hit—via tweet from Kaepernick--it has been shared, mocked, picked apart, praised and shamed all over every single social media platform and at every office water-cooler. But love it or hate it, the campaign did what it set out to do. Between September 2 and 4, sales sky-rocketed 31%.

As we’ve shared on this blog—and seen all over the net—Twitter has been working hard to clean up their act, reducing fake accounts and bots in-an-attempt to stop the spread of fake news. But is it enough?

Are we entering an age where transparency and collaboration are key to a successful ad campaign? Many experts think so. After the scandals of the last year where social media platforms were forced to come clean about who they are sharing information with, consumers demand transparency.

Similar issues over at competitor Twitter. We reported on the Twitter purge in our last newsletter--the platform’s big fake account and spam clean-up that has drastically reduced some celebrities’ followers.